Travel: A falling out between friends

What skydiving does to the human heart

For about 20 minutes last weekend, dressed in
a jumpsuit with a parachute strapped to his back, Merlin Cormier became my new
best friend. It happened about 9,000 feet in the air, just below cloud canopy,
when I, clipped via harness to him, shook with fear while seated at the mouth
of an open airplane door. Meanwhile he, rippling with far more experience than
me, calmly reassured my nerves, then coaxed them out of the plane and into the
wide open sky, from which we both fell at great speeds.

Whistler Skydive has been up and running for
most of the summer. Steve Smith is the owner. A long time pilot, his head
shaved and eyes friendly, Smith fell in love with the dreamlike absurdity of
skydiving about eight years ago.

“I did my first tandem in Switzerland,” he
said, arms propped up on the patio railing of the outfit’s Pemberton airport
digs. “That night in the bar, I was sitting with the instructor and my brother,
and I said, ‘I have to figure out a way to do this for the rest of my life.’”

Come 2005, a business agenda began to take
shape. Over the next three years, working closely with his brother, Whistler
Skydive would make it from paper to reality. Asides from Cormier, with his
4,000 jumps and competitor’s stature, there’s also Kane Gray, the New Zealander
with 4,500 jumps. He’s also thrown himself to the terra for competitive
reasons.

While all this should be reassuring —
and it is, if you let it soak in — there’s little comfort to be had when
you’re about to hurl your body out of a plane. The whole concept seems so
intensely inappropriate, so arrogantly unnatural. But maybe that’s the allure.

Most recently, skydiving made the news in a
rather bombastic way with Michel Fourneir. The 64-year-old Frenchman planned to
float from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, all the way up into the
stratosphere, then jump the 130,000 feet back to earth. It was late May of this
year, a Monday, but he had to postpone because of weather. The following day,
he gave it another go, only to have his hot air balloon come untethered and
make the stratospheric journey without him. A bummer, no doubt.

But people have jumped from the stratosphere
before, no biggy. In 1960, Joe Kittinger sailed a balloon over 30 km into the
air. Then, styling some fancy pressure suit, he simply jumped out, returning to
earth some 14 minutes later. Undertaken by the United States Air Force, it was
called Project Excelsior, and, after a failed attempt in which he passed out in
1959, Kittinger found himself earthbound at 988 km/h for 4.5 minutes before
pulling the chute, all in the name of professionalism. Clearly, that is
ridiculous beyond description. Imagine Kittinger trying to have a good jog
later, maybe watch a movie with the wife — how completely dull and
uninspiring. I bet he drank.